Education reform

Seven questions for Diane Ravitch

FOR years Diane Ravitch frustrated progressives with well-honed arguments in favour of charter schools, standardised testing, an education marketplace and accountability. She served as an assistant secretary of education during the first Bush administration, where she worked on creating academic standards at the state and federal levels. Since then, she has been a leading education-policy analyst, professor and author of five well-received books (she has authored ten books and edited 14 others over the length of her career). But it was her most recent work, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System", that garnered the most attention. In it Ms Ravitch, who was a strong proponent of George Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, does an about-face on many of the reforms she once championed. As usual, her arguments are compelling. So we asked Ms Ravitch about her change of heart, and about what needs to be done to fix America's education system.

DiA:What prompted you to change your mind on No Child Left Behind, accountability and charter schools? Was it a gradual change of heart, or was their one piece of evidence that persuaded you that reform was on the wrong track?

Ms Ravitch: I supported NCLB when it was passed in 2002, along with almost 90% of the Congress, thinking that it would improve learning. I continued to be hopeful until 2006, when I attended a conference at a conservative think tank where scholars reviewed the law's effectiveness in specific jurisdictions. Every paper agreed that the law's remedies were ineffective. By day's end, I was persuaded that the law itself was ineffective, was imposing immense bureaucratic burdens, and was not helping children. In November 2007, when national test scores were posted, I saw how little progress had been made in the subjects that the law emphasised (reading and mathematics), and I wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that Congress should "get out of the classroom". Everything I have learned since then has convinced me that NCLB has encouraged states to lower their standards to meet the law's utopian goal of 100% proficiency by 2014. The benefits have been few, and the nation's classrooms are incentivised to focus only on testing of basic skills while ignoring everything else. This approach does not produce good education.

DiA:In your writings you reference a national evaluation of charter schools which found that compared to regular public schools, 17% of charter schools got higher test scores, 46% achieved the same results as their public counterparts, and 37% did significantly worse. Why do you think charter schools have not lived up to their promise?

Ms Ravitch: Charter schools have been oversold as panaceas. On average, charter schools do not have better results than regular public schools. On national tests, charter students have never outperformed those in regular public schools. But the media loves a story about a school that produces miraculous transformations. Their favourite is the story about a school that opens in a blighted neighbourhood, enrolls poor and minority students who were doomed to fail, and then sends all of them to college. There may be some such charter schools, but they are not typical of the charter movement. And some of these "miracle" schools achieve better results by taking a smaller proportion of the hardest to educate students: those who have limited-English proficiency, those with disabilities, and immigrant children. Some of the highest-performing charters have a high attrition rate; those who leave are usually the lowest-performing or most difficult students, whose exit helps to sustain the "miracle".

DiA:What is wrong with the idea of an education marketplace, where the best ideas, best teachers, and best schools are rewarded? Doesn't this spur innovation and compel best practices?

Ms Ravitch: In theory and on paper, it sounds like a good idea. In practice, over nearly two decades of charters, it has not happened. Milwaukee, for example, has had vouchers and charters longer than any other district. In theory, the competition was supposed to improve all sectors. This has not happened. None of the sectors is a lighthouse of innovation and best practices. All are struggling. The marketplace has provided choice without benefits. At the same time, it has eviscerated the public sector and reduced the belief that there is a communal responsibility for the community's children. And that there is public responsibility for public education. The marketplace encourages a sentiment of everyone for himself, winner take all. But as to educational improvement, it is hard to find.

DiA:Focusing on teachers, it is very hard to fire bad ones and nearly as difficult to attract good ones. How do you propose we improve the quality of teachers in America? And how do we hold them accountable for their performance?

Ms Ravitch: Of course, we should fire bad teachers, and management should negotiate means of doing so with their unions. But even "bad" teachers should have due process, to be sure that they are not being fired because they disagreed with their principal or for other non-meritorious reasons. In some districts, school leaders are imposing bad programmes, and any teacher who speaks against them risks losing their job. They must have the right to due process and not be subject to arbitrary and capricious firing.

DiA:How do you respond to a critic like Chester Finn, who says your "prescription for the future is guided by wishful thinking, nostalgia and unwarranted faith in an antiquated institutional arrangement"?

Ms Ravitch: My friend Chester Finn believes we should "blow up the system". I am not a radical or a revolutionary. I don't believe in blowing up the system. I believe in improving it. Having studied American education for four decades, I believe that improvement will be hard, but is possible. Blowing up the system is not a good answer to a hard problem.

DiA:Regarding No Child Left Behind and charter schools you've written, "I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for." What will? Or is it unrealistic to hope for a "quantum improvement"?

Ms Ravitch: I believe that we need improvement across the board. We need a larger and more humane vision of what education is, to begin with. It is more than scores on multiple-choice, standardised tests of basic skills. The data we use now to judge "quality" is itself flawed and easily gamed. We need a vision of education that recognises that it consists of not only basic skills, but knowledge of history, geography, civics, the arts, science, foreign languages, and literature. We need better educated teachers, better examinations for incoming teachers, principals who are themselves master teachers, superintendents who have some experience as educators, rather than as businessmen or lawyers or military officers. We need more professionalism, not less. We need curricula that reflect the education we want. We need assessments that gauge understanding, not just guessing skills.

All of this will take time, but less time than has been wasted on NCLB and that will be wasted on Barack Obama's proposals to close thousands of schools with low scores.

DiA:Do you think Barack Obama's proposed changes to No Child Left Behind are adequate?

Ms Ravitch: No. They are too deeply rooted in the flawed assumptions of NCLB. There is no evidence that closing schools, firing principals and teachers will magically produce better schools. There is no evidence that there are 5,000 outstanding principals waiting to be called to lead these schools, or that hundreds of thousands of "great" teachers will leave their jobs to teach in stigmatised schools. This is the same punitive approach embedded in NCLB. It rests on a fundamental belief that schools need incentives and sanctions, a whiplash to improve. It is based on test scores, and it will do nothing to lift education in those schools or in any other schools.

As in healthcare, too much of our education funding goes to administration and other expenses that have little relation to learning.

Where I live in California, we have a ridiculous number of school districts, many with a single school of a few hundred pupils but still with the administrative layers that any district needs to have. Yet resistance to consolidation is fierce, under the slogan of "local control" and smartly encouraged by the unions (who presumably prefer to negotiate their contracts with small, under-resourced administrations). Just one example of waste that should have a pretty easy solution.

One difference between American schools and the system I grew up in (in the Netherlands) seems to be that in America each school is a complete community, expected to provide for all the students' needs--from sports to special-needs care. External clubs, independent of a school, do exist but tend to lack their own facilities and take a back seat to the school programs. Perhaps schools are being asked to do too much, causing wasteful staffing and spawning self-perpetuating constituencies that detract from the educational mission.

The collapse in the public schools is a side effect of greater opportunity for women. The schools used to be largely run and almost entirely staffed by ridiculously overqualified women. I doubt their granddaughters have followed them.

Double the pay for new hires. Current teachers can compete with the newcomers for the higher pay, but they must give up tenure to do so. If they choose to retain tenure, they get their old pay.

You're right Heimdall, it is refreshing to her response to NCLB. However, I wish she didn't dodge DiA's question. Saying we need to redefine education, or determine better quality metrics does little to solve problem.

I think your approach is sound, but as I mention on the other DIA string, the requirements for education have changed significantly. it is possible that more computer literate countries (South Korea for instance) have already managed to incorporate new requirements into their schools, but it is important when looking at reform to take a step bakc and ask if the paradigm in platy is relevant anymore. With Education, I get the feeling that kids are learning more pertinent tools from their interactions with friends than at school in many ways.

It is refreshing to see a conservative with a data-based rather than faith-based approach to both their beliefs and subsequent policy recommendations.

First thing I'd suggest for education is the same as what I'd suggest for health care: look around the world to see if anyone is doing it better. If so, see if their approach could work here. If so, implement it.

We can then continue to try to improve education, but at least we'd be starting from a higher baseline...

This women is another "expert" who does not teach and never has, never acted as a principal or a school administrator. What are her qualifications WELL she is a "Professor of Education" and she makes her livelihood by writing worthless comments that include no real suggestions. Lets, then return to the "good old days", yes those wonderful days of Mickey Mouse standards, teachers who could not be fired and a school population that was lilly white.
She needs to teach in a middle a school with 186 kids over 6 periods who can't master 3rd grade math but they are are in the 8th grade. Maybe then she can experience the real world of education not the B.S. of another school of education with endless dissertations that no one reads and if they did they would find them meaningless self indulgences.

I have to disagree with bampbs. Doubling the pay of new hires is overly ambitious. Frankly, I don't want to pay for it and the rise of companies whose sole purpose is to take half of what the increase on your property taxes would have been suggests the American public agrees with me.

Lots people like to talk the talk. Even more people are walking the walk that says teachers are on their own. Feel free to fund their pay raise yourself though. However, in Texas we spend way too much on football and associated stadiums, if you want to pull the money out of that, feel free.

Sir Wellington, it's the teachers that are the problem. Them and the pupils and principals and the school boards don't help. The solution, I think, is to replace our schools with Skinner boxes and put puppies inside.

Ms Ravitch is doing more of the ducking and diving the education system (especially the unions) has been doing for decades. What are the measures of performance she would base decisions on? At what point would she fire a teacher? How would she ensure that the better teachers are paid more than the mediocre ones? At what point is a school so bad that it should be closed? And if not closed, what is her specific plan for the bad school to become a good one in 5 years? And what if it doesn't stick with its plan, what then?

No more squirming and slithering. Generations of kids are paying for the ineptitude and spinelessness of educators in terms of lower wages and higher crime rates. Let's stop protecting, subsidizing, and bailing out mediocre teachers and principals.

Oh, Doug, you're really going to leave the textbooks? And the soda machines? You just want Coke to win! You would take out the cafeteria people, just to leave Chick-fil-A. You want all of our children to be little sugar addicted, butter-balls so buzzed up on a caffeine high they can't be forced to recite the president's wives maiden names in alphabetical order.

Sir Wellington, do you really want to debate my point, of all the points made in this thread? How about this proposal, then: What if we just automate education and get congress, the school boards, the teachers, pupils and cafeteria people out of our schools.

Doug,
No school boards are the problem. Say, I want to try performance based pay for teachers. The school board can say "No." Or vouchers. "No." Or standardized textbooks. "No." Or standardized tests. "No" (Or rather, just make up their own standards as with NCLB).
All "reform" is just suggestions made to states and ultimately to the school boards. It seems like a much better thing for the state governors and Congress to tackle together. The executive is completely impotent to do anything and I think I prevents real reform. Education reform should be at the top of the state's agenda, but it isn't because people expect the Feds to do something about it. Nonesense.

In Response to Tenure. Do not confuse tenure with due process. For example, in Colorado a teacher is probationary for the first 3 years, meaning their contract is year to year. After that it is a continuing contract where due process must occur if the teacher is to be terminated.